A Year of Magical Thinking is a meditation on grief. Faced with the sudden loss of her husband and the uncertain health of her daughter, Joan Didion tries to hold the pieces of her world together. The book offers a voyeuristic glimpse into an upper-class introvert’s ideal life—Didion and her husband, also a well-known author, had built an insulated existence that, apropos of nothing, ended. Full of anecdotes and disarming vulnerability, the reader can’t help but participate in Didion’s loss.

Summary As was the fashion in 1759, Adam Smith endeavors to explain what we call right and wrong, as well as why we arrive at these conclusions. The cornerstone of his theory is based on the concept of sympathy. Smith posits that, just as humans are endowed with the sense of sight, they are also equipped with a sense of sympathy. The brief definition of sympathy is the ability for one human to “enter into” the experience of another. This “entering in” does not perfectly mirror the original experience, but critically, it is perceived through the lens of an impartial spectator. This impartiality forms the foundation of all morality. ...

Deserves its place in classic American literature. It also deserves to be read in high school as it walks the balance of respecting norms and traditions while maintaining a personal responsibility to rise above them when they fall short of our ideals. Thus, the reader is left neither a dupe nor Anarchist, but responsible for their own sphere as well as their ‘place’ in society.

Summary I remember coming across the Wikipedia summary for this book after Baudrillard did an analysis in his bewildering Simulacra and Simulation, which read: It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents. At the time, I thought it was a strange summary, maybe a typo or something—after all, it doesn’t make any sense! So I, in my naivete, tucked this away in the “read later” list. I’ve read the book and can confirm the above sentence is a valid summary. ...

I was expecting this to be a collection of stories, but it was more about the actual mentality of survivors themselves. Overall, really entertaining read, but I wouldn’t rely too heavily on the advice inside it other than general rules of thumb. The one thing about survival stories is everyone is unique, and so advice that is good in one situation may get you killed in others.

Summary Rosenberg sets out to ‘prove’ through Neuroscience that the way we understand our past, present, and future might not be based on a misunderstanding. In what is sure to ruffle the feathers of academics of every stripe, Rosenberg uses various studies as a lever to overturn several common theories of mind. For the uninitiated, a theory of mind is an explanatory framework whose purpose is to explain the mind to itself. Most common theories of mind rely on the iconic duo of desire and action. Charles is crying because he can’t get an ice cream cone. In the previous sentence, we are met with Charles’ desire and the action that results from the desire, a cause and an effect. Rosenberg then uses this as a jumping-off point to argue that this core assumption that almost all theories of mind make is flawed. ...

Summary This book follows the careers of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, focusing on the second half of FDR’s administration from 1940 to 1945. By this time, Franklin had been the U.S. President for nearly two full terms. During those two terms, he had transformed the federal government to an almost unrecognizable extent, implementing many policies we now take for granted, like Social Security, the FDIC, the SEC, and the 40-hour workweek. These policies were part of a larger platform known as the “New Deal,” which was essentially a labor reform agenda that emerged during the Great Depression. ...

Summary The Federalist Papers are a collection of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in support of the Constitution drafted in 1787, over a decade after the Declaration of Independence. With the benefit of hindsight, historical events and structures can often seem predetermined, obscuring the many decisions that had to be made along the way. The journey of the United States from independence to forming a federal government was not a straight path. The land won by the Revolutionary War consisted of 13 colonies, newly rebranded as “states.” Each state had adopted its own constitution shortly after rebelling against the British crown. These individual states were loosely united during the Revolutionary War under the Articles of Confederation, which defined a weak central government and functioned more like a treaty than a true organizing principle. This absence of centralized energy resulted in many inefficiencies during both war and peace. It may seem obvious now, but for the governors of these separate states, the idea of surrendering autonomy and assuming shared responsibility with neighboring states was far from intuitive. Thus, the framers faced an uphill battle in convincing all 13 states that it was in their best interest to form a federal government. This debate can be seen as an early manifestation of the enduring tension between “big government” and “small government.” Even though the federal government of that time was far more limited than it is today, it still represented a form of “big government” that had to contend with many of the same critiques leveled by libertarians today. The framers’ greatest inspiration was their nearly obsessive desire to construct a government that would, by its very design, prevent the rise of a dictator. “It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” – Alexander Hamilton One of the key principles was that it should be the structure of the government itself that prevents abuse of power, not merely the laws it creates. This is why so much of The Federalist Papers is devoted to discussing which responsibilities should fall to the legislative, judicial, or executive branches. It was also part of the rationale behind making the Constitution difficult to amend, as the framers hoped to limit the extent to which any bad actor could consolidate power. ...

Summary John Maynard Keynes would go on to become a household name in economics, ultimately achieving the highest honor of becoming an adjectival eponym for his ‘Keynesian’ style of economic thinking. Keynes published this monumental work in 1936 during the height of the Great Depression, a period that baffled many classical economists. The primary issue at the time was cripplingly high unemployment rates paired with low demand, triggering a deflationary spiral. Theoretically, this situation should not have occurred because higher unemployment would typically lead to lower wages due to increased competition for jobs. Lower wages should, in turn, result in higher profits for investors, leading to increased investment and, subsequently, higher employment. This is what economists call equilibrium, where demand and supply are perfectly balanced. So why wasn’t this happening during the Great Depression? Classical economists believed that some form of market distortion, such as fiscal or monetary policy, must have been at play. Keynes, however, argued that the distortion they sought was not the result of policy but an inherent feature of economies themselves. While it might be simplistically argued that free markets will eventually find the prized equilibrium, Keynes believed that economies could get stuck along the way, like a climber snagged on a ledge. He summarized this idea in his best-known quote: “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” The central idea of Keynes’ The General Theory is that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labor but by the aggregate demand in the economy. This marked a departure from classical schools of thought, which assumed that supply would naturally generate demand. Keynes observed several circumstances that could disrupt this process. For example, wages tend to be “sticky,” meaning they are more easily adjusted upwards than downwards. As long as demand grows, wages can be sustained, but when demand contracts, employers are more likely to lay off workers than reduce wages. Moreover, Keynes emphasized the role of behavioral economics, noting that while thrift may be a virtue for individuals, widespread saving instead of investing can contract overall demand. One solution Keynes proposed for governments to stimulate a stagnating economy was through active spending. In hindsight, this is precisely what helped pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression. Between FDR’s New Deal and the massive government investment spurred by World War II, these actions acted like defibrillators, restarting the economic engine. Why is government spending sometimes necessary to combat deflation and high unemployment? It starts with a Keynesian concept known as the multiplier. This principle connects to another economic concept—the marginal utility of income. If someone with no money is given $1, that first dollar has a huge impact. Each additional dollar continues to have an effect, but eventually, the impact diminishes. This principle is known as the Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC). Classical economists assumed that each new dollar would be equally likely to be saved or invested, but Keynes’ MPC demonstrates why this is not always true. In a deflationary spiral, the problem becomes how to encourage consumption when prices continue to fall. The multiplier effect shows that if you target individuals with a high MPC, you can increase overall demand. Government programs that direct funds to those most likely to spend can create a virtuous cycle, where every dollar spent by the government increases the gross domestic product (GDP) by a multiplier. For example, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocated over $780 billion to boost economic demand, had an estimated multiplier effect ranging from 1.5 to 2.5—meaning every dollar spent could add up to $2.50 to the GDP. ...

Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, language and the void, and why contact might never mean mutual understanding.